This month CF:G would like to welcome Selina, our key contact for liaison between CF:G and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who are one of our major sponsors. We caught up with Selina to find out more about the amazing work she does in FinTech. Be sure to read on to hear her tips for working in FinTech!

What is your role at Bank of America Merrill Lynch? I work as a global programme manager in Global Markets Technology covering our in house systems that generate risk, scenarios and profit and loss data for a number of trading businesses. Here are a few facts to highlight the scale our team work at - we compute and generate 250 million rows in our database using a grid of 1500 nodes for computation of the results, a week. For data required by the regulators, each time we generate 7 billion rows of data using a grid of 6000 nodes. We support a large number of trading products, 190 in total across 3 regions and up to 15 different trading desks.

What is one of the most exciting parts of your current role?Making an impact to the Global Markets business and interacting directly with my senior business stakeholders everyday on a global basis from Hong Kong, via London to New York. I have been able to travel with work, and that has been amazing, but it has got tougher now that I have two children.

What were you working as prior to joining BofAML? A developer building tools to optimise portfolios for a long short equity hedge fund.

As the BofAML<>CF:G Relationship Manager, what do you liaise with CF:G on?Supporting CF:G in their courses by finding volunteer instructors and mentors from the firm. We also host and help organize the annual summer party for CF:G. As well as any other support we can offer through the year for CF:G like speakers for the annual CF:G conference coming up in November. It’s one of my favourite parts of my day working with CF:G helping to inspire and give opportunities to women to change their life.

Looking back to when you first started working in FinTech, what advice would you give to yourself back then knowing what you do now?I would give myself three bits of advice:

Believe in yourself - no one else will if you don’t.

Be resilient - you will face tough times, just being smart is not enough.